‘Scrapping the exemption that renewable electricity producers had under the climate change levy, a tax that is meant to help cut emissions. In effect, a green tax just became an energy tax.’
Photograph: Julian Stratenschulte/Julian Stratenschulte/dpa/Corbis

See if you can guess which politician said this: “We need a recovery that is sustainable environmentally, not just economically. I believe that this can be a huge opportunity – greening our economy can be a win-win solution.”

Al Gore, Ed Milliband, or Caroline Lucas, perhaps?

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If they were elected, the politician said, they would ensure the Treasury would no longer be “the cuckoo in the nest when it comes to climate change”. The Treasury would “become a green ally, not a foe”.

On Wednesday, the same man who uttered those warm words on the environment in 2009 and 2010 stood up in parliament and delivered a budget that was many things, but definitely not green.

From turning a tax designed to encourage renewable electricity into a tax on renewable electricity, to making a Porsche cost the same to tax as an electric car, everywhere you turned in George Osborne’s speech there were measures that cast the Treasury back in its traditional role of green foe.

The budget marks the completion of the chancellor’s slow volte face on the environment. We’re now a long, long way from the Conservative party’s enthusiastic adoption of green talk as part of its modernisation and detoxification, and David Cameron’s husky moment in 2006.

Ed Davey, the Lib Dem former energy secretary, said of the decision that 'Cameron may as well hug a coal power station'

Some may argue that Osborne never believed in the green project as the prime minister did.

New roads will be built, fuel duty will be frozen (again), vehicle excise duty (“road tax”) will be reconfigured from 2017 so that, after the first year, the buyer of a low-carbon electric car will pay the same as buyers of the most polluting 4x4s and sports cars.

And in case you were in any doubt about the direction of travel, on Friday the Treasury effectively killed off a longstanding goal of making all new homes “zero carbon” from 2016. Ed Davey, the Lib Dem former energy secretary, said of the decision that “Cameron may as well hug a coal power station”.

Several senior figures in government, such as Cameron and the new energy and climate change secretary, Amber Rudd, appear to be genuinely committed on a personal level to green issues. But for Osborne, the summer budget conclusively buries and paves over the man who once criticised the Treasury for being “at best indifferent, and at worst obstructive” on environmental policy.